Lou Mallozzi is a Chicago-based artist known primarily for his work in sound, often with a focus on dismembering and reconstituting language, gesture, and signification. His work includes performances, installations, music works, recordings, and radio works. In addition, he has a visual art practice that includes drawing and other media. He has performed and exhibited in the U.S. and Europe, including projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Italian Cultural Institute and Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University Bloomington, Experimental Intermedia New York, Podewil Berlin, TUBE Audio Art Series Munich, and the Radiorevolten Festival Halle. In addition to his solo works, Mallozzi often collaborates with artists, filmmakers and musicians, including Sandra Binion, Michael Vorfled, Alessandro Bosetti, Michael Zerang, Frédéric Moffet, Antonia Contro, Jacques Demierre, Vincent Barras, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Charlotte Hug, and many others. He has received support for his work that includes several fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, and artist residencies through the Chicago-Lucerne Sister Cities Program, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Ragdale Foundation, and Spritzenhaus Hamburg. He is on the faculty of the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is executive director of Experimental Sound Studio.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Dr'm't'c C'nstr'ct'ns

Dr'm't'c C'nstr'ct'ns exploits the pronounced tunnel-like quality of its site: a construction canopy at a building site, a long, narrow conduit of crisscrossing humanity by day, an empty shell of human traces at night. The long sides of the canopy face off through language: on one side, a series of sentences could be describing the individuals passing through; on the other, a vocalist and director construct melodramatic responses to an unnamed narrative. The texts are linked by bursts of operatic music, the sanctioned icons of joy and sorrow, and they coalesce, contrast, or dissolve in miniature scenes or atomized images.

Paces is a sound and video installation by Lou Mallozzi and Gustavo Matamoros. The piece is site-specific in its evolution and presentation: the artists perform a "pursuit and avoidance" action that is videotaped and miked from five perspectives. They then reassemble the resulting sounds and images into an installation that superimposes an action in the space onto the space itself, creating a media double in the architectural context.